Eat your weeds

When I was ten, I would do almost anything to get out of eating greens. Mind you, in retrospect I think I was displaying precocious good taste, my mother’s use of the word ‘greens’ being very probably an offence under the Trades Descriptions Act because green they certainly were not. No, given the kind of treatment that only my mother could inflict, they were a kind of dirty grey-brown, smelly and slimy. Appetising, non? All the more bizarre, then, that my mother’s whinging, foot-stamping daughter has turned into a green freak, mad about growing them, cooking them, eating them … and, er, gathering them (come on, if nature is going to provide me with food without me slaving away over hot soil or crawling round in the soil by moonlight picking off slugs, then who am I to argue?). 

Having been somewhat preoccupied with other matters, such as fitting The Most Complicated Shower Door In The Universe, we've been neglecting the potager somewhat of late, so that its lovely, pristine, dug over and manured state has turned into a field of weeds. But as I noticed this morning as I was standing nearby painting three concrete posts (don't ask), they're not just any old weeds. They're fat hen weeds. 

Also known as Lambs Quarters or by its botanical name Chenopodium Album (but you knew that, didn't you?), fat hen is apparently one of the most ubiquitous and widely distributed plants on earth: it’s been a staple in the diets of many countries for thousands of years. And it just loves potagers and allotments and vegetable gardens of all kinds - I think it sees them as a challenge. It can be used in the same way as spinach, and is good simply cooked with butter and nutmeg, or in a gratin or tart. In the resto days when I actually (sigh) had time to cook (and people paid me ... sigh again), I used to make fat hen gnocchi; at the end of a long hot réno day though that just felt like one fiddle too far, so tonight it found its way into a frittata with some local cheese, the last of last year's crop of butternut squash, a handful of left over corn and some crème fraîche. And tomorrow it will turn itself into a fat hen risotto, made using stock from the weekend's roast chicken (aaargh - I'm beginning to sound like Nigel Slater).

And then it will meet an unhappy end under the hoe.

The best laid plans ...

This afternoon was marked up for a Serious Start on the first wash of L'Atelier's walls. With pigment, that is - yellow ochre from Provence, and sienna earth from Italy, if you're interested - not with St Marc, the ubiquitous lessive that cleans everything (except plaster dust, of course) and has been a constant feature of my life over the last two weeks as we've attempted to clean up the chantier. That, however, was before John came in with 3 kilos of Rosé-des-Prés (a kind of posh field mushroom).

Now there's only so much fungus that two people can eat at any one time. Especially when they've just been munching their way through the two and a half kilos he brought home three days ago - but, hey, downshifting is downshifting, and foraging is ... fun, and free food. So while we've set aside some to cook for dinner this week, there was nothing for it but to set to and look at how to preserve the rest.

Bottling, I decided, was out. Too complicated, and seems to involve boiling oil. Hmm. Drying? Well, one of the many projects on my list is to make a drying cabinet, but that will have to wait (to use a phrase that seems to form an increasing part of my vocabulary) until all this is over and life is back to normal again ... Some of the smaller mushrooms I flash fried in olive oil with a little garlic and parsley then froze; the rest I decided to turn into a duxelle.

A duxelle is a glorious thing: while the volume reduces, the flavour and intensity increases. If you've never tried it, do - it's very simple, even if it does tie you to the stove for a while. You simply chop finely, mince or - if, like me, life's too short - pulse in the Magimix a good quantity of mushrooms and around a fifth of their weight of onions; fry the onions first in olive oil until they're transparent and start to take on a little colour; then add the mushrooms and stir it all around. At this point you find you have a pan full of wet, unappetising mush, which looks like this:

What you're aiming to do now is to gently simmer out all the liquid until the mixture starts to 'fry'. This will take - er - over two hours if the mushrooms are very fresh (well, I never said it would be fast, did I?). As time goes on, you need to stir the pan more and more often to stop the mixture sticking and burning; you're aiming to reduce the volume usually by around two thirds. Eventually you'll end up with a sort of pâté thick enough for a wooden spoon to stand up in; now season it, and you're done.

So then what? Use it for stuffing; add it to soups and stews (especially good with Puy lentils); add some chopped parsley, garlic and pangritata, then spread it on bruschetta; make beef Wellington; spread it over the pastry base of a mushroom tart before adding the rest of the filling; drape it around pasta; use it as a relish ...

We haven't, so far, done very well at finding any of the big names such as cepes or chanterelles or morilles or girolles nor sadly (and I say this at the risk of tarnishing my already somewhat ropey reputation) the more - er - magical varieties. But that's because we've not had the time to go out looking for them beyond our own back yard, so to speak. When all this is over ...